"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick
themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
Winston Churchill

I Stumbled over Alcohol can be a Gas by David Blume. Blume
details level headed Ethanol production within a Permaculture
economy, that is best served IMHO by a real free market economy
that would be very environmentally responsible when compared to
present circumstances. In a free market world without a corrupt
EPA, an invigorated Court with Jury would extinct all forms of
polluters except those who run processes that turn waste into
non polluting benefits.

Collecting evidence of damage is no longer the province of a
billion dollar organization now that a grandmother with a $200
digital camera can use the internet. Give grandma access to the
Courts without an EPA and watch things clean up around her
parts!

Looking for more sensible answers?

Enter Permaculture. The technology is here, NOW! You will have
to read the book to get it all, but save to say, most post 1986
autos can use a blend of 50/50 Gasohol, stretching our supplies
far into the future. As Free Market Fuel economy standards rise
to catch up with E.U. and elsewhere, we can see a shift to E-85
using a fraction of oil for transport. The big profits in
Permaculture lie elsewhere, Ethanol is but a portion of the
profit.

More energy to make Ethanol out of Corn than goes into it?
This is The Big Lie. You have been fed pie by the hacks of Big
Oil as they laugh all the way to the bank. Blume spells it all
out in his book. There are many serious crops that can yield 8
times energy invested. Corn, while actually energy positive is
not even in the running, so Big Oil uses corn as their whipping
boy. The so called Free Press trumpets the Lie right into your
living room and if it were not for people like Blume, you would
not have a clue.

The REAL problem? Huge elephants stand in every parlor room and
crap and piss all over the floor. The Odor alone should evoke
attention. It hasn't.

1. U.S. cycling of Federal Reserve Notes into the world economy
to prevent instant inflation here without the FRN for Oil for
Arms trade. Last? It won't because It can't. The 70's Sex Icon
Dr. Henry Kissinger made most OPEC countries sign agreements to
buy oil with FRN's and made it very easy for them to buy USA
inc. arms. Symptoms that should evoke sobering thought are the
aggressive illegal invasion of Iraq due to Saddam selling his
country's Oil in Euros and the saber rattling about a Nuclear
Iran, a smoke screen to force Iran to keep taking the FRN,
Or Else!

WE now spend 3 billion dollars a day more than We earn as a
country. Do you suppose that 3 billion dollars a day debt is the
real reason for a war on some Terrorists? I think some people in
DC don't want The Party to end and opened up one of the "ready
to eat" plans cooked up by Scoop Jackson's Bolsheviks (a.k.a.
the Neocons) in the Pentagon 40 years ago when they knew the
Cold War would someday end. Leonard Lewin and Fletcher Prouty
warned of this brewing storm in their writings decades ago.

2. If, no. When the FRN-Oil-Arms trade collapses, more people
will have to actually perform honest work. The USA will be a
Pariah the world over, hated like the Spaniards of olde. The
answer is a free market economy, Individual Liberty. We will
have to start over, working with ourselves at first. We could
accelerate a healing by instituting across the board debt
forgiveness and start clean. This would give an opportunity to
remove the false god central issuing authority of exchange and
allow the true author of exchange to become diffuse once again.
The traditional Author of wealth has over history has come out
of 5 sources. It is farming, mining, forestry, fisheries and the
inventor's mind. That first generation wealth flows to artists,
teachers, the butcher and the baker who ply their trade. This is
how things should be.

Those used to stealing as well those abetting theft would go
free also, and due to the fact that they are disadvantaged in a
free marketplace, that would be Justice Served. We need to focus
on Peaceful Trade and fulfilling our productive Lives. Live in
the Now. Those Fleas won't matter, except to History. Let them
adapt to a life filled with Honor and Character or die. The lazy
average bloke will have to quit focusing on how much Paris
Hilton had to drink last night and learn a useful trade and
become an above average bloke.

Does that bother you? It doesn't bother me.

Problem? The beltway around DC would become a ghost town and
power will have to revert to the Individual and very local
government. We can continue on the course we are on and watch a
Police State rise to H.R. 1955 proportions and beyond forcing
you to use Oil as it dwindles and maintain D.C.'s dinosaurs in
whiskey, coke and caviar.

Those feasting on Power won't surrender power they stole fair
and square. Beltway bandits would rather threaten to kill you
than have to work with you and sit on a tractor digging up
fodder beets for Ethanol and cattle feed. Think they are
kidding? Carbon taxes are next!

They are today's Apache, We are the Pima.

We Farm, They Steal. Some things never change.

Goes without saying, D.C. Apache need Petroleum Broadcasting
Network's NATIONAL SOCIALISM HOUR with Jim Lehrer to Lie for
them, mostly by omission. Real Apache have no reason to Lie, for
They have their Honor. Stealing some corn from the Pima had its
risks, you could have lost your horse while you were grabbing a
few ears of corn. They played fair. It was a game that could be
controlled. The DC Apache who claim to rule the world are
playing a madman's game that can't be controlled.

3. 1/2 of every Barrel of oil yields plastics, pesticides,
herbicides, pharmaceuticals etc. That $100 42 gallon barrel
helps generate thousands of dollars of economic activity. Not to
worry, oil economy can be subbed by Permaculture within a free
market economy fully using all the tricks Mother nature blesses
us with when we practice Permaculture. Medicine, rubber,
fertilizer and other necessary items will be made at a profit
from Methane or Ethanol via Permaculture and that profit will be
Local. Besides, Oil won't disappear, it will just be another
commodity. It will get here due to the fact that it exists.
Hydrocarbons are all some countries have to sell.

Hopefully we will have the good sense to buy from both, or the
marketplace will choke out the weaker one.

Drawbacks:

Deconcentrating power from DC to the Local level is not
without cost. The Military Industrial Pharmaceutical Educational
Complex will experience tremendous upheaval when exposed to a
voluntary marketplace. Trade across oceans will change, perhaps
the owners of shipping companies will prosper or they will
undergo a downsizing.

I don't really care if KLM, or Kissinger and his Chinese
Generals at COSCO take it in the shorts, Do You? Do you care if
a home in the beltway looses 90% of its value? I don't.

Subsidies to Big oil, running in the hundreds of billions of
dollars and the paltry 2 Billion dollars Ethanol subsidies which
due to a change of a few words in Legislation puts most of that
money in big oil's pocket, will have to go.

Does that bother you? It does not bother me or the bulk of
Ethanol advocates.

Your 3 dollar gas really costs 10 dollars or more if you add in
subsidies to Steal the oil and guarantee transport to a
refinery. Think "National Defense" until it sinks in. That
National Defense guarantees delivery to countries everywhere at
your tax dollar expense, not at the expense of the Multi
National Oil companies. The Queen would have to pony up some
Pounds to defend her holdings in BP or trick her Subjects into
paying for it.

Does that bother you? I doubt if I will loose any sleep if
Americans can one day make their own fuel and the Mid East mess
with that associated portion of our military is but a fading
memory.

If you have read this far, You might be concerned about the Food
vs. Fuel controversy. Rest assured there need not be a trade
off. It is possible to make almost 50 Billion gallons of Ethanol
and 2 to 3 times that energy equivalent in methane from this
country's output of primary treated sewage to grow cattails for
renewable fuel on 1.5% of the most marginal agricultural land or
even use old gravel pits and some tailing ponds from mines as
growing media. Piston engines in the U.S. burn about 145 billion
gallons of fuel a year.

I like it that Ethanol can equal fuel cell technology mpg in an
IC engine. The combustion efficiency of Ethanol is something to
be admired. With proper engineering they even beat diesel.
Gasoline vehicles aren't even in the running.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2006/2006-05-22-03.asp

You may have also noticed that Indy cars are now using Ethanol?

Do you suppose there is a reason GM and others are building flex
fuel vehicles?

Don't buy the Big Lie, Ethanol is no turkey. Ethanol has a
future in North America.

How did we get into this energy mess? It started with George
Washington and Alexander Hamilton.
They each owned the largest alcohol stills in the U.S. at the
time of the Whiskey Rebellion. Enforcing a tax on alcohol
guaranteed many would give up on making fire water. The tax
imposed did just that.
They got very rich and didn't seem to care if others bled to
make them rich. Some money was raised for the Treasury.

Over a century later, Along comes John D. and with his
Standard Oil millions he buys a hard drinking Congress with
Temperance Movement help to pass the Volstead Act and a
Constitutional Amendment to kill alcohol altogether so he could
sell a waste product called gasoline to the public that he used
to flush down the river at night, into a huge politically
derived profit.

Today, one can make fuel alcohol cheap and the regulatory
process now is an easy 2 page form to fill out to send to the
ATF. Blume's Book tells you how and what to say. There is no fee
to fill out a form and no tax on fuel for transport or heating.

Eventually, the permit process will die. The whole reason for a
tax on booze was two fold, raise revenue and exclude small
competitors to enrich Hamilton and Washington. Last time I
checked, both are dead. The tax on booze is now $21.00 a gallon.
The cost of enforcement is $20.00 a gallon.